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Using GraphicConverter for image management
A few months ago I was upset enough with the slowness of working with my growing collection of digital images in iPhoto 1.1.1 that I ditched the program and decided to move back to GraphicConverter to manage my images. I have mentioned this in Mac Net Journal a few times over the last couple of months and often people have asked for information about how I do my management in a program that is better known as an image editor and file conversion tool. Here are some answers.
First, a little background. I take photos for book projects and magazine articles, mostly high-quality images taken with my less-than-high-end Nikon CoolPix 950 digital camera. My wife Natalie and I bought the camera to use while writing our book Insiders' Guide to the Olympic Peninsula, which we researched and wrote in 2000, and when we did this project iPhoto was not in existence so I created my own simple image management system using the Finder under Mac OS X (back then it was under the Public Beta) combined with GraphicConverter. Now the Swiss army knife of graphics applications has more capabilities and better contextual menu actions that make image management much more efficient.
The most powerful part of GraphicConverter as it applies to image management is the Image Browser. The browser lets you look at images in whatever folders you use to store your photos. In my case, each month I create a new folder with a name like "8-2002 images" that lives in my Pictures folder under OS X. I set up the Image Capture application to automatically launch when I insert my Compact Flash card adapter into the PC-Card slot on my PowerBook, and I just click Download All to move all of the new images from the CF card into the appropriate folder.
Once the images are in their proper calendar-based folder I can organize them into sub-folders. In our current book project for Birding Washington, I create a sub-folder for each site that we will profile and include in the book. To create a folder I Control-click on an image and choose New Folder from the menu, then give the folder a name to reflect the site where the photos were taken. In the browser window image above, two of these folders can be seen in the image area. Once the folder is created, I simply click on the first photo to be moved into the sub-folder and then Shift-click on the last photo to be moved and drag all of the photos to the new folder where it can be seen to the left side of the Image Browser.
This is not unlike how you can manage and create sub-sets of photos in iPhoto. The difference here is that I am moving the actual images rather than creating a growing list of aliases in a burgeoning iPhoto database. This system takes up less disk space and sticks to the principle of KISS - Keep It Simple Stupid.
This facet of image management is easy, but the beauty of using a real image editor to manage as well as edit your images is that everything you need to manipulate the images is right there. If I want to rotate an image in the browser, I Control-click on the image and choose to rotate it by picking the proper item from the drop-down menu.
I can also do a host of other actions through the contextual menus: Upload images to an FTP server, select a range of images and run them as a slideshow, do a batch rotate action by selecting multiple images, or run a custom script to perform an action on the images. These capabilities are powerful and convenient, and again they stick with the KISS principles, which is how I like to work with critical images that may first appear in Mac Net Journal or in my nature writing Weblog The Equinox Project and then later appear in print in a magazine or a future book. The more critical the images, the more protective I am of how I will handle them.
It could easily be argued that much of my image management could be duplicated in iPhoto, but by its nature iPhoto is a simple image management tool for families and individuals who want to keep all of their photos in one place. iPhoto is designed to be simple, and as such it cannot be customized to fit your individual work flow unless you add third-party applications - a real image editor, a tool for working with multiple iPhoto libraries to help keep the library size small enough for either backing up or to keep the program working without dragging to a halt. Derrick Story from O'Reilly Networks wrote a useful article full of iPhoto tips for power users, and the article made me think twice about my system until I remembered that all of these things can be done just as simply in GraphicConverter. The weakness of using GraphicConverter is its lack of obvious ways to create slide shows of HTML pages of selected images with the same ease that this can be done under iPhoto. GraphicConverter also doesn't have built-in hooks to digital image printing businesses or book creation templates like iPhoto does.
There are of course other programs for managing digital images. I have been wanting to take an in-depth look at iView Media Pro, which is a tool used by many professional photographers who work with Macs, but so far I haven't wanted to spring for the cost of buying the program when I already have a working system using my paid-for $30 copy of GraphicConverter. Also, to be fair, the only way to evaluate something as critical as an image management program is to immerse yourself in the program for weeks or months, and this takes a major commitment, which is something I have a hard time justifying while I am writing and researching a book with deadlines looming.
For now, GraphicConverter is my tool of choice. And with such an approachable price combined with the features that make it stand out from iPhoto, it is something that any professional photographer should consider if like me they start to grow tired of the limitations of iPhoto.
By the way, GraphicConverter just keeps getting better these days. The newly announced version 4.4.4 that was released yesterday adds the ability to tie in with the Toast Titanium Pro CD-burning program to create custom CDs of your images through a new contextual menu option. At $30, I would argue that GraphicConverter is one of the best software buys a Mac user could make...
Rob McNair-Huff is a longtime Mac user and writer from the Pacific Northwest. In addition to writing about the Mac, and running this Web site, Mac Net Journal, he is the author of two books - Insiders' Guide to the Olympic Peninsula and Mountain Bike America: Washington - and he is working with his wife Natalie to write a third book this year called Birding Washington. If you have a need for Mac consulting, writing, Web design or photography help, check out Rob's business site: White Rabbit Publishing.  Donate to support MNJ
© Copyright 2002 Rob McNair-Huff.
Last update: 10/24/02; 1:24:06 PM.
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